Great quote from Leo Laporte on this week’s Mac Break Weekly.
this is the risk inherent in treating your users as consumers as opposed to creators – is that you could actually breed the creaters out of userbase and by doing so, kill it.
Whole podcast is worth a listen. Leo states a lot of my own concerns with the future of the Mac platform.
The sad fact is that that is simply what comes when a technology’s user base reaches a certain critical mass.
User/Creator/Enthusiasts haven’t been economically relevant in computing for over 10 years. Radio and aviation went through similar phases early in the last century. My father, who was active in both communities in the ’20s and ’30s, tells stories of inventors/developers and their start-ups and tech-politics that sound very contemporary (He’s still going at 96, and until recently was an active web user.)
The enthusiasts never completely go away, and they can still have an important impact as a leading edge, but they never remain the main drivers of the technology in question.
Sadly, I have to agree. I’m glad that I live in the time period we live in. Then again, other things will come along to keep the pioneers busy. 🙂
The upside is that technology gets cheap. The downside is that you have to break open sealed cases, void warranties, and jailbreak OSes to mess around with the guts.
The real downer is when the regulation starts. And I don’t mean Uncle Steve but Uncle Sam. So far, for the most part, we’ve managed to avoid being “given” our own FAA or FCC (but the NSA _is_ watching…) This is partly due to the rapid level of change in digital technology, and the fact that despite its ubiquity, nobody _really_ understands it yet. By comparison, it took the better part of a century to get from Johannes Gutenberg to Martin Luther.
10 to 20 years, on a political timescale, is just a heartbeat.
I always thought that one of the smartest things Microsoft did was to make their development platform so accessible. They even give away free versions of Visual Studio. They know that the easier they make it to develop for Windows, the more people will, and the better the Windows ecosystem is. As Balmer himself said, “Developers! Developers! Developers!”
The podcast after this one (released today) talks a TON about flash. Another great episode.